Waxing Lyrical

Frame-grabs from Oscar Oskar Fischinger’s animated WAX EXPERIMENTS.

What he would do, Mr. F, is he would melt different colour of wax together until he had a big cake of the stuff under his rostrum camera. Then he’d shave different layers off with a razor, exposing one frame at a time, to end up with a rippling, marbled effect as the different tones were exposed.

The effect is a cross between a weather formation and a medical condition — kind of disturbing as it ripples and throbs and spreads — also undeniably beautiful.

[…] Frame-grabs from Oscar Fischinger’s animated Wax Experiments – What he would do, Mr. F, is he would melt different colour of wax together until he had a big cake of the stuff under his rostrum camera. Then he’d shave different layers off with a razor, exposing one frame at a time, to end up with a rippling, marbled effect as the different tones were exposed. […]